Soap is a chemical product that is used in a wide variety of applications. The main use of soap is for the washing of objects such as clothes, dishes, vehicles or practically any other object, the cleaning of floors, walls or practically any other surface, and the bathing of the human or animal body. Soap is also used in textile spinning or as a component of lubricants.
Soap's cleaning ability is provided mainly by certain components known as surfactants, which are both hydrophobic and hydrophilic. The hydrophobic part of the surfactant bonds with the dirtiness, while the hydrophilic part is attracted to water, causing the surfactant to link water and insoluble dirtiness, allowing dirtiness to be carried by water and thus eliminated from the object, surface or body to be cleaned. In addition, soap reduces the surface tension of water, increasing water's ability to make things wet.
Soap is a salt of a fatty acid. Soaps for cleansing are obtained by threating vegetable or animal oils with a strongly alkaline solution. Fats and oils are composed of triglycerides; three molecules of fatty acids are attached to a single molecule of glycerol. The alkaline solution, which is called lye, brings about a chemical reaction known as saponification. In saponification, the fats are first hydrolyzed into free fatty acids, which then combine with the alkali to form crude soap. Glycerol is liberated and is either left in or washed out and recovered as a useful byproduct, depending on the process employed.
Cleaning, washing or bathing soap is generally marketed in solid form or in liquid form. Solid formed soap can be presented in dust-like particles and in larger sized portions known as soap bars. Soap bars are normally used for hand washing of clothes and of the human or animal body, as they are easy to handle and friction against the surface to be cleaned. However, soap bars present the drawback of becoming virtually unusable once they have been used down to a small size that makes them difficult to handle. For this reason, soap bar remnants are discarded before they are entirely used.
Soap bars are used in households, in the industry, in commercial facilities such as hotels or spas, and in institutional establishments such as schools, hospitals and nursing homes, only to name a few. In these scenarios, a relatively large amount of money could be saved, and thus better invested in other enterprises, if soap bars were able to be used in their entirety.
Various attempts have been made to provide a soap bar recycling device that provides for reuse of soap bar remnants. Among these are found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,030,867 to Don D. Everman, U.S. Patent Application No. 2011/0127245 to Leon Burrus, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,968,390 to Stephen Lister. However, none of these attempts have successfully provided the market with cost-effective devices for recycling soap. In practice, households, commercial facilities, industrial facilities and institutional establishments continue to discard solid soap remnants and broken shards.
Accordingly, there remains a need in the art for a soap recycling device that successfully transforms used soap bar remnants into sterilized, reusable soap, and that is also able to be constructed into a relatively compact and affordable product that is suitable for both the consumer market and the business market.